When I moved house, I took the opportunity to up my level of anonymity just a notch or two to match some mild paranoia. This was to tackle two main problems:

• telemarketers love me. Because I have a telephone. Conversely however, I’m not so keen on them. While some of them have been put off by my getting onto the Australian Direct Marketing Association "Do not call" list, this is only effective for companies which are members, and I haven’t re-listed myself since I moved. I have asked some calling telemarketers if their esteemed (yet annoying) organisation is an ADMA member, and they say no, they got my phone number out of the phone book. Yes, some people are paid to flick through the phone book finding people to ring up and annoy. Isn’t western civilisation wonderful?
• the other one is that a couple of times I’ve had letters published in the paper, and got anonymous nut bags (or it might have been the same person both times) writing to me, having apparently got my address out of the phone book. This makes me just a tad uncomfortable. It’s not like I have proposed re-introducing slavery or anything so radical or controversial. At least, not in my view.

So I decided a little more anonymity would be a good thing. And when I moved, I decided to get a silent line. No moreWhitepages for me thank you Mr Sensis. It’s a couple of bucks extra per month, but if all goes well, means a lot less hassles from telemarketers in the long run.

The problem is, it didn’t get done. On a whim the other day, after receiving a telemarketing call on my mobile (argh, don’t get me started), I looked up my details in theWhitepages online. And found them. Uh oh. Not so much "silent" as "bellowing". "Here be Daniel! Roll up, roll up, dial this number to bombard him with phone calls!"

I rang the phone company and they apologised profusely, flagged me as silent and gave me a $6 credit on my account. The lady admitted $6 was paltry in the circumstances, but evidently employee empowerment only goes so far. And she thanked me for being polite about it. Sounds like people can get a bit shirty in these circumstances - though for those for whom a silent line is the difference between peaceful existence and some scary dangerous person tracking them down, I could understand that.

So at least when the next phone book comes out… I won’t be in it.

Well I think I’ve got my new neighbour at work housetrained. Now when he makes a speakerphone call, he closes his office door beforehand. And everybody’s happy.

The guy who is in Mr Speakerphone’s former office seems very quiet. No booming laugh, no loud meetings with the door open, and no speakerphone calls. He does, however, wear a bum bag around the office.

Also after a worrying week when the supplies of milk and teabags (and coffee, though I don’t use it, what do you think I am, some kind of latte-slurping caffeine junkie?!) were so scarce that it was BYO teabag and black tea for a while, civilisation has returned, as someone has been organised enough to get all the supplies back in. With a bonus -Milo, for those who shun tea and coffee, and instead crave the sophisticated flavour of chocolate milk.

Yes, that was me you may have heard on 3AW orGold-FM yesterday. With mypublic transport advocacy hat on, I’ve started doing some media. This is not something quite I’m used to, and I need to do some work on finding the fine balance between speaking reasonably and finding something moderately inflammatory to say so the media run it. I also need practice at not sounding like I’m half asleep, even if I am, and being able to come up spontaneously with an angle on the day’s hot topic that I may not have been aware of before the journos ring. It’ll be an interesting learning experience.

11pm. Josh gave me a shout to say that Rove are doing the "dropping computers from a great height" thing. Damn copycats.

Today marks 13 years of the Toxic Custard mailing list, which predated this web site by about 5 years. It was all a bit silly, really, but it continues to keep me and others amused.

"Number 61! Number 61!"

The girl paused, looking around. "Number 61!" Number 61 was AWOL.

"Number 62!" Number 62 stepped forward. I looked down at my ticket again, to check the number. Number 64.

A bloke came forward. He didn’t take a ticket from the dispenser, but went right up to the deli counter, well forward of those of us hanging back waiting for our numbers to come up. Ah, I thought, so there’s number 61, turned up at last and wants to muscle in because he pissed off elsewhere before because he couldn’t be bothered waiting. One of the deli staff came free and sure enough, asked to be allowed to muscle in. The teenage staffer reluctantly served him.

Another bloke came along with his girlfriend. Tugged at the ticket dispenser, and where the rest of us handled it okay, he managed to fluff it and pull out four tickets. Four. Obviously trying to look the epitome of cool in front of his girl, he kept walking with the four tickets, a few metres along the counter, then casually ripped 67 from the top, and discarded 68, 69 and 70. The nerve! Most people at least try and put the unwanted tickets back - try to stuff them back into the dispenser, hand them to new people arriving for a ticket, or balance them on the top. Not this guy. Oblivious or uncaring to the chaos he would cause after his departure. Git.

My number came up. I got my stuff, then sauntered off to the milk section. Behind me I could hear the growing frustration in the girl’s voice. "68! Number 68! 69!… Number 69! 70?" And so it went on.

Instant movie review: The Navigators. Another explosive Ken Loach spectacular rollercoaster-ride. No, actually he’s more known for his thought-provoking social studies, most of which seem to end in tears. This is another of them. But this story of privatised rail workers has striking parallels in Melbourne: the absurdity of the successive rapid-fire changes in company names (another onecoming soon), and former colleagues competing against each other. One can only hope that the progressively more and more aggressive cost-cutting at the expense of safety is not something that has been duplicated here.

Instant movie review:
Shaolin Soccer. On the way to meet the others for the movie, I was waiting to cross Lonsdale Street when a bloke behind me spoke into his phone. "Yeah I’m almost at Village. I’m just walking down Little Bourke now." I felt like shouting LIAR! into his phone. I mean really. I hate people who claim to be where they’re not.

Anyway, before it started we were all ratherMIFFed when they announced it was the dubbed version. But it was still bloody hilarious - like Jackie Chan meets Crouching Tiger meets The Matrix meets the World Cup. Highly recommended.

Following the departure of Mr Speakerphone and numerous others around the floor, the new blood has started to arrive. As yesterday morning one bloke had already positioned himself in the office next to my desk. No sooner had I arrived than I found him starting up a speakerphone conversation with someone to find a meeting room.

With his office door open.

Uh uh. No way. I’m not going through this again.

So I got up and went to close his door. He was just finishing. I explained to him that it was loud, that I could hear the entire conversation. He seemed to accept that with good grace, and I hope he’ll keep it in mind the next time he wants to have a chat with somebody and not have to hold the phone, and I won’t have to quote the Occupational Health and Safety rules at him.

Why do people have this fascination with speakerphone conversations anyway? Almost every time it’s not like they’re urgently doing something else and need their hands free - they’re usually sitting right in front of the phone, hands in front of them, talking into it. I mean, I could understand it if he were busy typing something, mousing around some important spreadsheet, or calling a phone sex line, but he wasn’t.

Today more people flooded in. One woman arrived with all her stuff - computer, phone, headset, books… very serious and business-like… until she unpacked four cuddly toys to sit on the shelf above her desk.

Meanwhile in television land…

Nostalgia goes prime time. From September the ABC will be returning Doctor Who to our screens, 6pm Monday to Thursday. If they’d team it up with The Goodies again it would be just like when I was a kid.

Now, cynics might say it’s part of the Howard government’s campaign to chop the ABC’s budget so it can barely afford anything else, and push us back to the fifties. I suppose returning a 1963 vintage TV show to prime time will get us a fair way there. For me, I’ll just enjoy the memories. My kids will no doubt enjoy it too - and finally some of their friends will understand what they are on about when talking about regeneration, Daleks and the TARDIS… if the ABC publicity department play this right, a new wave of Dalekmaniacould take over the school grounds of Australia by late September. But I do fear for one aspect of their education, with the scrapping of Behind The News.

The semi-traditional weekend update.

On Friday night I bought some shoes. This is something of an achievement, as I am majorly crap at buying shoes. I’m better at buying clothes than I was, but the shoe-buying skill still eludes me somewhat. It had to happen though - my usual work shoes, having put up for some time with five-day-a-week wear, were showing signs of stress. Time to get a second pair, get the first ones repaired, and rotate thereafter. After a failed attempt at Chadstone on Thursday night, I moseyed down Bourke Street after work and by some miracle fairly quickly found a very nice pair. Very nice. I’m wearing them now. I’m still getting used to them, but they’re muy cómodo. I’m telling you.

Saturday I headed out with the old pair to the local shoe repair place up by Carnegie station. The parallels between car repair and shoe repair were immediately evident, the bloke behind the counter tut-tutting, looking over them and telling me how much work was going to be involved to fix the hole in the bottom of one of them and to re-do the sole and heel, and how it was going to cost $50. Yikes. I pondered this for a little while, and just like when the car mechanic tells me some extraordinary amount of repairs is needed, decided to go for it. After all apart from the hole they were a quite serviceable good pair of shoes (which cost me three times that originally).

Then I caught a tram to
Elsternwick library, where according to the online catalogue there could be found a copy of Virginia Woolf’s "To The Lighthouse" waiting for me. I’ve been scrabbling around for something to read other than the morning paper, so when this came
highly recommended I thought I’d give it a go, though I’m in no mood to be buying any more books when there are still some waiting to be unpacked at home, so borrowing it from the library seemed like a good option. Even if they did make me pay an outstanding sixty cent fine before I could take it.

I started reading it while waiting for a tram back, and obviously looked so engrossed in it that the old lady also waiting there felt compelled to alert me when the tram arrived. With the distractions of Glen Huntly Road noise and movement all around, I found the first few pages rather heavy going, and this may instead be a book that requires as its reading environment a quiet room, a comfortable chair, and a cup of tea at hand.

The summit of Mount Donna Buang on Sunday. My handy-dandy camera’s pan feature came in handy again. Click it for a nice big version (379Kb)

That evening it was time for an evening out with an ever diminishing number of friends. Dinner for seven, a movie and post-movie dessert for four, and eventually just two of us left for a wander around Readings. No matter, all thoroughly enjoyable. The movie ("A Mighty Wind") was very amusing, and gets a thumbs-up from me.

The traffic jam on the way to the snow. But no traffic up at the summit.

On Sunday I took the kids on our annual outing to the snow atMount Donna Buang. The snow report was very favourable, with heavy falls having occurred earlier in the week, and it seems a lot of other people wandered up the mountain that day, as there were queues along the way - twice on the road, and another to hire toboggans. No matter, a chance to eat our picnic lunch. But after the queues was the mountain, the glorious snow, the sun shining down on the summit, and the joys of skidding down the slopes on a bit of hard plastic. The waiting and the long drive were worth it. Even forgetting to take gloves wasn’t a problem.

That night I caught some of the Concert for Holly/cancer awareness, in between watching a tape of Saturday’sDaily Show. The Daily Show (Global edition) purports to focus on international events covered by the previous week’s Daily Shows aired in the US, but actually it’s more of a best-of compilation with a few "international" links thrown in by Jon Stewart. Some of these links are of doubtful value - the wisecracks about different languages might be amusing to an apparently insular New York studio audience, but I cringe a little when they come up. But the rest of the show is, at least to me, a very funny look at US current affairs. Something along the lines of an American version of CNNNN orBackberner. With anSBS-added blur to obscure the Comedy Central logo in the corner.

When the tape had finished, the Concert for Holly came back on. Problem was, having missed the start, I had no idea who Holly was. It eventually became apparent from watching (and checking the TV listing) that she was Holly Robinson, who had died of cancer, and before she’d died of cancer had hung about the Channel 10 studios. Possibly some kind of Channel 10 gopher or something. The concert itself felt like a Big Gig re-union show, and now I’m wondering if Holly was related to Ted "1990s ABC Comedy Supremo" Robinson.

I once went to a taping of The Big Gig. It was after its halcyon days, the sunset period, when the edge of its comedy was rather less sharp than it had been. Arguably the funniest stuff was all in the audience warmup, material which wasn’t aired, such as theDoug Anthony All Stars doing their impression of Christian youth camps ("Running and leaping and praising God!") And so this resurrection of a lot of the Big Gig characters like Candida and Shirley Purvis felt a bit stale, though the Sandman/Flacco bit and some other segments raised a smile.

The DAAS sung "Throw Your Arms Around Me"yet again - will that damn song never die? It was fabulous the first time they did it - as with their "Heard It Through The Grapevine" (which to their credit they have never repeated), the context made it what it is. Lowest of the low brow innuendo and savage biting sarcasm suddenly give way to a beautifully performed song. A masterstroke. That’s been lost in the subsequent dozen performances - now it’s just tiring.

The addition of some unbearable visiting English boy singer (Gareth someone) and his forgettable song (which they tried to convince us was good by noting that it was a UK hit) did nothing to help. I mean, if it’s a concert specifically dedicated to a particular person, what is the point of shoving in an import like this, someone who has undoubtedly never heard of the person being honoured, and is only trying to gain some publicity for an assault on our local CD-buying teenagers?

Ah well.

Click. Beeeeeeeeep. Someone pushes the door open and we pour out of the train, onto the platform and start towards the exit, a narrow gap between a ticket validator and the wall.

Stop! A lady is entering the platform to get on the train. She passes and the throng continues on, somehow orderly squeezing ourselves through the bottleneck and out of the station.

Some go straight ahead to the street - the shops, the zebra crossing, the bus stop. Some go left, cutting across the grass behind the shops to the main road. Some go right, to the carpark. And the rest of us double-back over the old wooden footbridge, the train still waiting beneath for the people to clear. As I climb the stairs I look up at the sky, the stars obscured by cloud. If the moon is out, it’s not making itself obvious.

As many feet thump up and over the bridge, the train glides away, its passengers also heading home.